Essays on economic crisis, decoding dominant ideologies and creating a better world

Tag Archives: Mexico

As a candidate for president, Donald Trump claimed he wanted a better deal for U.S. workers. Surprise! Oh, okay, that he was lying really isn’t a surprise at all. Far from a “better deal,” the Trump administration is now offering a North American version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Although it might have seemed that the TPP was dead and buried after several years of struggle by activists on both sides of the Pacific Ocean (President Trump had as much to do with TPP’s demise as a rooster does for the rise of the Sun), the TPP’s language is being used as a model for a re-negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Trump administration issued an 18-page document on July 17, announcing its “Summary of Objectives for the NAFTA Renegotiation.” Please try to contain your excitement. But to spoil the fun of actually reading the document, the net result, should these plans come to fruition, would be to strengthen corporate power, not promote the interests of working people. There is almost nothing concrete in the text’s 18 pages but much boilerplate language that reads as if it was lifted from the TPP. In fact some of the language appears to be repeated word for word.

“In a blunt display of hypocrisy, Donald Trump appears to want to copy and paste the weak labor and environmental provisions of the TPP, a deal that Trump claimed to hate. Based on today’s ‘plan,’ one could be forgiven for concluding that Trump’s opposition to the TPP was merely political theater and this administration has no intent of fundamentally changing NAFTA.”

“Trump’s statement indicates he plans to step up his war on public health and the planet by modeling NAFTA’s provisions related to environmental regulation on the TPP. These objectives appear to set the stage for a stealth attack on strong regulation of food, agriculture, chemicals, and biotechnology.”

It would be all too easy to say “We told you so,” but, really, was it realistic to expect a billionaire who built his empire on screwing working people and who has populated his cabinet with a rouge’s gallery of corporate plunderers to do otherwise?

Meet the bosses’ panel, same as the old panel

Any re-negotiation that doesn’t eliminate the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision isn’t a serious re-negotiation. The “Summary of Objectives” document doesn’t, and it isn’t. Instead, the document offers a few reforms that will not change the substance of ISDS. The key passage states: “Establish a dispute settlement mechanism that is effective, timely, and in which panel determinations are based on the provisions of the Agreement and the submissions of the parties and are provided in a reasoned manner.”

That is consistent with the sort of language one can find in most any so-called “free trade” agreement. And that is actually a part of the problem — the one-sided tribunal decisions repeatedly handed down that strike down environmental and health regulations are consistent with “provisions of the agreements.” So the Trump administration’s goal would change nothing.

The only specific changes proposed are that tribunal submissions and final decisions be made publicly available, and that hearings be open to the public. As these proposals are found on the last page they do not appear to be at all a priority. Measures to reduce the secrecy of the process are welcome, but these would have no practical effect on the inherent unfairness of this process.

The same tribunal that handles complaints by multi-national corporations against government regulation, an arm of the World Bank, will still handle these complaints. The same structure, under which corporate lawyers who specialize in representing these corporations in regulatory disputes alternate between being lawyers and judges, handing down decisions with no accountability and no appeal, would remain in place.

There is no mention of NAFTA’s Chapter 11, which is the agreement’s linchpin. Chapter 11 codifies “equal treatment” in accordance with international law and enables corporations to sue over any regulation or other government act that violates “investor rights,” which means any regulation or act that might prevent the corporation from earning the maximum possible profit regardless of harm to others.

The rulings that have previously been handed down will remain as precedents that will be used in future hearings. If an earlier tribunal ruling said that a ban on a known carcinogen is prohibited by NAFTA rules protecting “investor rights,” that precedent will remain in place and be used as a justification to knock down the next health or environmental rule. That the tribunal would have some of the veil of secrecy lifted from its decisions won’t change any of this. As long as Chapter 11 exists, the same one-sided decisions will be handed down. As long as the investor-state dispute settlement provision exists, the same one-sided decisions will be handed down.

There is no “reform” that can make this system fair. There is no alternative to eliminating completely the entire investor-state dispute settlement system. The Trump administration is offering cosmetic changes that leave untouched the ability of corporations to force the reversal of rules protecting health, safety, labor or environmental standards.

Capital beats people in trade language

The “Summary of Objectives” document purports to adopt standards for labor and for the environment, but the language used is very similar to the language proposed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and in use in other so-called “free trade” agreements. There is little at all in these stated goals that differs from the stated goals that Obama administration put forth for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They are meaningless window dressing.

In the language of trade agreements, rules benefiting capital and erasing the ability of governments to regulate are implemented in trade-agreement texts with words like “shall” and “must” while the few rules that purport to protect labor, health, safety and environmental standards use words like “may” and “can.” So although the Trans-Pacific Partnership was promoted as constituting a big advance in protections for labor, health, safety and the environment, those were empty platitudes.

The Trump administration’s supposed intentions here are even less sincere given its undisguised contempt for environmental concerns.

The only specific change proposed is the elimination of Chapter 19, which means the elimination of anti-dumping review panels. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy said the elimination of Chapter 19 would ensure that dumping of commodities (illegal for industrial goods) will occur unchecked by countervailing duties. Agricultural dumping of subsidized U.S. crops under NAFTA has driven millions of Mexican farmers off their lands. As more are driven off the land, more Mexicans will be forced to migrate to the United States by whatever means necessary and Mexican agriculture will continue to be badly hurt.

As for employees in manufacturing, The “Summary of Objectives” document does not meaningfully address the offshoring of jobs, or NAFTA’s prohibition of “buy local” rules.

Nor does the above exhaust the list of proposals that will allow multi-national capital to run wild. The objectives concerning “trade in services, including telecommunications and financial services,” appear to be cut and pasted from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trade In Services Agreement. The goal of prohibiting “discrimination against foreign services suppliers” and against “restrictions on the number of services suppliers in the markets” signal the intention to eliminate any meaningful restrictions regulating the financial industry.

One prominent goal of the Trade In Service Agreement was to enable giant financial companies, particularly those based in the U.S., to take over the banking and financial systems of small countries, and it appears the Trump administration seeks to retain this goal, whether to directly target Mexican or Canadian banking, or alternatively as a model to be imposed in future trade deals.

Health and environmental laws will still be “barriers to investment”

Consistent with the objectives of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Trump administration says it wants to “Establish rules that reduce or eliminate barriers to U.S. investment in all sectors in the NAFTA countries.” What that passage means is that, consistent with what is written above, the intention is for the elimination of as many restraints on corporate behavior as possible.

Multi-national corporations consider a “barrier” to profits any rules or laws that protect health, safety, labor standards or the environment. Thus eliminating “barriers to investment” means eliminating protective laws. This would reinforce the tendency of the tribunal that renders decisions on corporate complaints to rule against protective laws.

There is nothing to celebrate in this re-negotiation. The North American Free Trade Agreement has been disastrous for working people and farmers in all three countries. The United States had a net displacement of 850,000 jobs through 2010 directly attributable to NAFTA, according to Economic Policy Institute calculations. U.S. food prices have risen 67 percent since NAFTA took effect, despite an increase in food imported from Mexico and Canada.

In Canada, the social safety net has been weakened while corporate revenue has doubled and manufacturing jobs disappeared. Composite revenues of 40 of Canada’s biggest businesses increased 105 percent from 1988 to 2002, while their workforces shrank by 15 percent and unemployment benefits were cut. In Mexico, nearly five million family farmers have been been displaced, inflation-adjusted wages are barely above the 1980 level and an unrestrained increase in mining has devastated Mexico’s environment.

Is it really necessary to make this worse? Yet that is what the Trump administration is proposing for its re-negotiation — another bait and switch. This follows another project for corporate plunder, President Trump’s supposed $1 trillion infrastructure plan, which is actually a plan for new “public-private partnerships.” Public-private partnerships are nothing more than a variation on straightforward schemes to sell off public assets below cost, with working people having to pay more for reduced quality of service.

No actual money is being committed. Rather, senior Trump administration advisers call for handing out $137 billion in tax credits for private investors who underwrite infrastructure projects. These officials estimate that over 10 years the credits could spur $1 trillion in investment.

Trade policy is yet one more front on which a fight must be waged. “Free trade” agreements have very little to do with trade and much to do with imposing corporate wish lists. As with all “free trade” agreements, the fault lines are along class, not national, interests. Industrialists and financiers around the world understand their class interests and are united to promote their interests. Working people uniting across borders, in a broad movement, is only path toward reversing corporate agendas that accelerate races to the bottom.

Like this:

The North American Free Trade Agreement has been a lose-lose-lose proposition for working people in Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Let us count the ways: Lost jobs, reduced wages, more unemployment, higher food prices and reversals of environmental laws. NAFTA, a 20-year laboratory for mainstream economics, has been a bonanza for the executives of multi-national corporations, and that is all you need to know why the so-called “free trade” model continues to be promoted despite the immiseration and dislocation it spawns. Agreements like NAFTA, and proposed deals that would go further in handing power to corporate executives and financiers such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, have little to do with trade and much with ensuring corporate wish lists are brought to life.

Not dissimilar to medieval doctors who insisted that having leeches bleed the patient was the only course of action, neoclassical economists, who dominate the field, won’t budge from their prescriptions of neoliberal austerity. But although the medical field has made enormous strides in recent centuries, there is no such progress among neoclassical economists. That is because said economists — most often under the banner of “Chicago School” but sometimes using other names — promote ideology on behalf of the powerful, not science for all humanity.

“Canada in fog” photo by Kat Spence

Thus the spectacularly wrong predictions made for NAFTA before it was went into force on January 1, 1994, have no effect on their predictions for new deals. To provide one example, in 1993 the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted 170,000 jobs would be created in the U.S. alone by 1995, that the U.S. would enjoy an expanded trade surplus with Mexico and that the Mexican economy would grow by four to five percent annually under NAFTA.

As we will see presently, none of those rosy predictions came close to becoming reality. (True to neoliberal form, the institute is grandly predicting “gains of $1.9 trillion” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.) The point here isn’t to pick on one particular institution — in fact, it is quite typical. The models developed to make these predictions and explain economics are mathematical constructs disconnected from the real world.

Sure it works better in a dream world

The Chicago School and other mainstream neoclassical schools of economics rest their models on the concept of “perfect competition,” which assumes that all prices automatically calibrate to optimum levels, and that there are so many buyers and sellers that none possess sufficient power to affect the market. This model assumes that employees are in their jobs due to personal choice, and wages are based only on individual achievement independent of race, gender and other differences. That this bears little resemblance to the real world is not your imagination.

“[T]his kind of modeling assumes a world in which liberalization cannot, by assumption, cause or worsen unemployment, capital flight or trade imbalances. Thanks to these assumptions, if a country drops its trade restrictions, market forces will quickly and effortlessly lead capital and labor to shift into new, more productive uses. And since trade always remains in balance, this restructuring will generate a dollar’s worth of new exports for every dollar of new imports. Given these assumptions, it is no wonder that mainstream economic studies always produce results supporting ratification of free trade agreements.” [page 104]

World Bank studies promoting “free trade” agreements, Professor Hart-Landsberg wrote, assumes that tariff reductions will have no effect on government deficits, governments will automatically be able to replace lost tariff revenue with revenue from other sources and that there is full employment. He writes:

“Although working people have been ill served by capitalist globalization, many are reluctant to challenge it because they have been intimidated by the ‘scholarly’ arguments of those who support it. However … these arguments are based on theories and highly artificial simulations that deliberately misrepresent the workings of capitalism. They can and should be challenged and rejected.” [page 80]

Mexican farmers forced off their lands

Mexico had annual per capita gross domestic product growth of 0.9 percent in the first 20 years of NAFTA — one-fifth of the per capita GDP growth of the preceding 20 years. The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that Mexico’s growth during the past 20 years under NAFTA ranks the country 18th of 20 Latin American countries and is half of the average Latin American growth rate. Among other results, the center reports:

• 4.9 million family farmers have been been displaced — more than half the total number of Mexican farmers in 1991.
• More than 14 million more Mexicans live below the poverty line than in 1994. Just more than half of Mexicans are below the poverty line, nearly identical to the 1994 rate, but the population has increased.
• Inflation-adjusted wages have risen two percent over 18 years and are barely above the 1980 level.

Subsidized corn from the United States flooded Mexico, sold below the costs of small Mexican farmers. Corn imports from the U.S. increased fivefold and pork imports from the U.S. increased by more than 20 times, according to a Truthout report by David Bacon.

As a result, Mexican farmers forced off their land either became seasonal workers on growing agribusiness farms, sought work in the cities or migrated north. Seasonal agricultural workers (those working less than six months per year) grew by almost three million — more than doubling their ranks — during the same period that 4.9 million family farmers were displaced. The number of Mexicans emigrating to the U.S. rose by almost 80 percent from 1994 to 2000, before falling significantly afterword because of the post-9/11 increased border security.

Nor did Mexicans get cheaper food as a result of the flood of U.S. corn. Public Citizen, in its just released report on NAFTA, reports that the deregulated price of tortillas nearly tripled in the first 10 years of the agreement and that a Mexican minimum-wage earner can buy 38 percent less than he or she could when NAFTA went into effect.

The only countervailing effect, the increase in factory jobs as maquiladoras (factories near the U.S. border producing for export) increased for a time, but those low-wage jobs are now dwindling because China’s wages are far cheaper than Mexico’s. The same pitiless market competition that sent jobs south now sends them across the Pacific. China now accounts for 23 percent of U.S. imports as compared to Mexico’s 12 percent, according to International Monetary Fund statistics.

“From the standpoint of the business community, NAFTA’s most important achievement was that it made Mexico a much safer and more attractive location to invest and outsource U.S. manufacturing production. NAFTA’s investment provisions created new and improved safeguards for foreign investors, including new dispute settlement tribunals providing a mechanism for settling disputes with foreign governments outside of the Mexican legal system. By eliminating Mexico’s developmental state and use of local content rules, and other demands and conditions on foreign investors, the trade agreement greatly reduced the cost of doing business in Mexico, and increased the security of those investments.” [page 6]

Mexico’s conversion into an export platform does not mean higher skills for its workforce. The biggest initiative in job creation came during the administration of Vicente Fox, which offered training in low-skill jobs for landscapers, construction workers, factory workers and maids.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs leave the United States

The United States has seen a net displacement of almost 700,000 jobs through 2010 directly attributable to NAFTA, according to Economic Policy Institute calculations. Moreover, the U.S. has had large annual trade deficits with Mexico since NAFTA was implemented; in earlier years, trade was roughly balanced between the two. In addition to the job losses, Public Citizen reports these negative impacts on U.S. workers:

• U.S. food prices have risen 67 percent since NAFTA took effect, despite an increase in food imported from Mexico and Canada.
• Purchasing power for U.S. workers without a college degree, adjusted for inflation and taking into account those consumer goods that have become cheaper, has declined 12 percent under NAFTA.
• Two-thirds of displaced manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2012 experienced a wage cut; the reduction in the majority of cases was at least 20 percent.
• U.S. manufacturing and services exports to Mexico and Canada grew slower after NAFTA took effect than it had been earlier.

By making it easier for capitalists to move production, NAFTA has directly contributed downward pressure on wages. With fewer well-paying manufacturing jobs, pressure on wages not only affects manufacturing but other industries as well as displaced workers seek employment elsewhere.

Capital mobility has been an irresistible hammer for holding down wages and worsening job conditions — a study by Cornell University Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner found that more than 50 percent of employers made threats to shut down and/or move their facilities in response to unionization activity during the three-year period of 1993 to 1995, and that the rate of actual shutdowns tripled from the pre-NAFTA rate. She wrote:

“NAFTA has created a climate that has emboldened employers to more aggressively threaten to close, or actually close their plants to avoid unionization. The only way to create the kind of climate envisioned by the original drafters of the [National Labor Relations Act], where workers can organize free from coercion, threats, and intimidation, would be through a significant expansion of both worker and union rights and employer penalties in the organizing process both through substantive reform to U.S. labor laws and by amendments to the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation.” [page 3]

That would take massive organizing to achieve. The Obama administration is actively trying to use the rules of NAFTA as a starting point for further weakening of labor, safety, health and environmental laws in the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which would tighten corporate control should the ongoing TPP negotiations be successful. The White House undoubtedly has the same goals for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks with the European Union.

Canadian safety net shredded to ‘compete’ in markets

Spending on Canada’s social safety net has decreased while corporate revenue has doubled and manufacturing jobs disappeared. In addition, a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives researcher reports, the country’s growing trade surplus with the United States has translated to few jobs. The study found:

• After 12 years of NAFTA, government transfers to individuals have dropped from 11.5% of GDP to 7.8% of the country’s GDP.
• “[M]uch of the growth in gross exports over the last decade reflected the markedly elevated use by Canadian-based companies of imported inputs in their production, significantly overstating the employment impact of the growth of manufactured exports.”
• The length that Canadians could collect unemployment benefits was reduced, the amount of the benefits were cut and the criteria for those eligible were reduced, reducing the proportion of unemployed people who qualified for unemployment insurance to one-third from three-quarters.
• Composite revenues of 40 of Canada’s biggest businesses increased 105 percent from 1988 to 2002, while their workforces shrank by 15 percent.

“The most striking feature of this growing inequality has been the massive gains of the richest 1% of income earners at the expense of most of the population. The growth of precarious employment, the undermining of unions as a countervailing power to transnational capital, the erosion of the Canadian social state, and heightened economic dependence on the United States are the hallmarks of the free trade era in Canada.” [page 53]

Pressing its advantage, Canadian big business interests demanded and received tax cuts on the ground that Canada could not be competitive otherwise. Those cuts resulted in loss of C$20 billion in federal revenue for 2005 alone, the study said, on top of provincial revenue losses of $30 billion. The tax cuts were primarily given to high-income individuals and corporations, who argued that these would create “a level field of competition” with the United States but also increase labor market “flexibility” — a code word meaning lower wages and reduced job security, always the goal of capitalists.

It’s always our turn to ‘cut back,’ never the bosses’ turn

The key NAFTA provision is Chapter 11, which codifies the “equal treatment” of business interests in accordance with international law and enables corporations to sue over any regulation or other government act that violates “investor rights,” which means any regulation or law that might prevent the corporation from extracting the maximum possible profit.

Under these provisions, taxation and regulation constitute “indirect expropriation” mandating compensation — a reduction in the value of an asset is sufficient to establish expropriation rather than a physical taking of property as required under U.S. law. Older decisions become precedents for further expansions of investor “rights” and thus constitute the “evolving standard of investor rights” required under “free trade” agreements.

Toothless “side agreements” on labor rights are meaningless window dressing; the arbitration bodies that decide these cases (in secret with no accountability or right of appeal) are governed by the main body of the text, such as Chapter 11. Corporations can sue governments over regulations or laws they don’t like, but working people and governments have no right to sue.

“The most any union or group of workers got from filing a case was ‘consultations’ between the governments and public hearings. There is no process in the agreement for penalties for violation of union rights. And although there are minor penalties for violating child labor or occupational health laws, they’ve never been implemented. Not a single contract was signed as a result of the side-agreement process, nor was a single worker rehired. Those unions that have filed cases have generally sought to use the process to gain public exposure of abuses and exert indirect pressure on employers.”

The neoliberalism that began gathering steam with the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and which has intensified since, is not the handiwork of some secretive cabal, nor is it some tragic bad turn from an otherwise “rational” system. It is the natural evolution of modern capitalism and its relentless competition. “Free trade” agreements that have little to do with trade and much to do with imposing corporate wish lists in the service of ever more inequality and power imbalances is an inevitable component.

Implementing a “reform” of agreements designed to maximize corporate profits above all other considerations and shred the remnants of democracy is less than an illusion. Overturning the entire “free trade” apparatus is indispensable to any serious project of building a better world. Trade should conducted for the benefit of all, not only the one percent — unlike the current global system in which human beings are in the service of markets instead of the other way around.